Panda.js

I started to work at Yle over a year ago as a full-time HTML5 game developer. With prior experience in HTML5 game development I chose to start developing with the Impact Game Engine since it had the features that matched the project goals at the time.

I soon realised that Impact lacked in features, it fell short on features like mobile support, tweening engine, particle engine, Web Audio, Spine animation, Retina support etc. Since I really liked the architecture of Impact, I started to develop the missing features as a plugins to the engine. At the time when I was building plugins for Impact I discovered a new 2D renderer engine called Pixi.js, that really impressed me with it’s performance on both desktop and mobile. Unlike Impact, Pixi also supported WebGL, which will speed up games even more in the future since it can utilize the graphics processor for rendering. Instantly I found myself implementing the Pixi renderer and utilizing it in my projects.

After a year of developing for Yle BUU with Impact, I noticed that i could turn my Impact plugins and all my knowledge into a whole new game engine, that’s when I started to work on Panda.js engine.

After some discussion I got a green light from Yle to release Panda as an open source project and on the 11th of February, I released the Panda website and source code at GitHub. With the engine, I also released open source Flappy Bird clone called Flying Dog as a technology demo.

Two weeks after the release, Flying Dog has reached over 1.4M gameplays, the Panda website has had 6.600 unique visitors (most from US and Russia), dozens of tweets and 150 stars on GitHub.

Go ahead and thrash your keyboard, test it out and create something mad with it and contribute. I will be updating, bugfixing and continue the development of Panda, but the development will primarily be centered around the needs of the Yle BUU projects.